The Internet is increasingly being used to transmit, store, view and share media files. These media files are sometimes short (two minutes or less) and sometimes longer, sometimes as long as several hours. As media consumers have adopted the use of the Internet for media delivery, the streaming media on demand, i.e., that is transmitting a stream of media content to the consumer for immediate playback on the consumer's device, has greatly increased.
One benefit of streaming media is that the contents of the media stream, e.g., the distinct media items that combined to make the stream of media, can be selected dynamically and in real-time. For example, a consumer may request a current events news program be streamed to the consumer for viewing and the resulting stream may be generated by assembling various independent media items such as news stories which are then sequentially transmitted to the consumer in as a single continuous stream of media data.
Current streaming media systems have been developed using the television stream as a template, and therefore mimic television's model of inserting seemingly random advertisements into the stream at specified points in the stream, known as commercial breaks. The advertisements bear no contextual relationship with the underlying media content and therefore rarely engage the consumer's attention.